JAZZ 101: Bebop

As I admitted early on, I'm not a jazz expert. Part of the fun of this blog for me is that it pushes me to learn, to experiment, and challenge myself to go farther. Jazz history, like art history, has a timeline of eras and movements that has been set in stone, so there are markers along the way. But as we know, those markers don't tell the whole story- there are always outliers, branches that veer off in different directions.

I'm working now on the "Bop" branch of the jazz tree. This may be old news for some of you (Don Byrd, I'm looking at you) but here's a quick synopsis pieced together from Wikipedia:

"In the 1940s, the younger generation of jazz musicians forged a new style out of the swing music of the 1930s."

"Swing improvisers commonly emphasized the first and third beats of a measure. But in a bebop composition such as Dizzy Gillespie's "Salt Peanuts", the rhythmic emphasis switches to the second and fourth beats of the measure. Such new rhythmic phrasing techniques give the typical bop solo a feeling of floating free over the underlying song form, rather than being tied into the song form."

Okay, so listen to Salt Peanuts above. The big band sound is still clearly there, and even if you can't count the 2nd and 4th beat emphasis, it is easy to feel that sense of floating, particularly in comparison to swing music of the era with its persistent, danceable beat. You can feel from this clip how groundbreaking it must have been.